[Dialogue] Now They're All For Bipartisanship

[Harry Wainwright]

Published on Tuesday, November 14, 2006 by Truthdig
<http://www.truthdig.com>  

Now They're All For Bipartisanship 

by Molly Ivins

 

Having watched election coverage nonstop all week, I sometimes wake
screaming, "Bipartisanship!" and scare myself. 

Of all the viral members of the media who have been suggesting that the Dems
cooperate with their political opponents, the one who rendered me almost
unconscious with surprise was Newt Gingrich. 

Newt Gingrich, the Boy Scout. Newt Gingrich, the man who sat there and
watched Congress impeach and try Bill Clinton for lying about having an
extramarital while he, Newt Gingrich, was lying about having an extramarital
affair. (This all took place during his second marriage. The first one ended
when he told his wife he was divorcing her while she was in the hospital
undergoing cancer treatment.) 

This is the level of Republican hypocrisy that reminds us all how far the
Dems have to go. I tell you what. Let's all hold hands together and sing,
"Oh the Farmers and the Cowboys Should Be Friends!" Just not, please, Newt
Gingrich, the man whose contribution to civility was to recommend that all
Democrats be referred to with such words as cowards, traitors, commies,
godless, liars and other such bipartisan-promoting terms. 

Please, anyone but Newt. 

Now, from my hours spent battered and half brain dead listening to the
fatuous, sell-important commentators of our nation, I learn that the people
of this country did not elect liberals to Congress last week. Nope, they
elected populists! Well, gosh all hemlock. I'll be go to hell. Populist! I
AM one. Honest-been a populist so long I'm on my third bottle of Tabasco. 

Who knew? I thought all said I was chopped liver. Populist. Like Tom Frank
of "What's the Matter With Kansas?" fame. Jim Hightower. We can even draw
our lines of political genealogy-via Ralph Yarborough and Bob Elkhart. 

A populist is pretty much for the PEOPLE and generally in this case exactly
the same as a liberal-we just put the em-PHA-sis on a different syl-LA-ble.
We also tend to be more fun. We do not vote to hurt average Americans, even
if the corporate payoff is really big. Even if it's just a little bit-like
the bankruptcy bill. 

We tend to focus less on social issues and more on who's gettin' screwed and
who's doin' the screwin'. In my opinion, Americans are not getting screwed
by the Republican Party. They are getting screwed by Large Corporations that
bought and own the Republican Party. 

The word populist was misused, abused and co-opted by right-wingers for
years, ever since we were all forced to read Richard Hofstadter's "The
Paranoid Style in American Politics." Bad history can do a powerful amount
of damage. Most of us stopped at the painful news that Tom Watson, leader of
the late-19th century populism, went on to become a raging racist bigot.
Populism itself took on the connotation of bile and nastiness, a la Father
Coughlin. 

If you read back to the beginning of the populist movement, however, you
will find Andy Jackson and the West set against all those dreary snobs of
the East. When Andy opened up the White House and let in the people, all the
snobs had the fantods. 

OK, it's not the 19th century anymore, but it is always the right time to
point out the emperor isn't wearing any clothes. Honest. There stands George
W. Bush, buck nekkid. We want to help him out of this fix because he's
dragging the whole Army, the country and the world down with him. But don't
ask us to call those clothes. 

Copyright C 2006 Truthdig, L.L.C. 

###

 

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